SciShow Tangents - Music

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

So look, Stefan sings a song in this episode, so I’m not sure what more you need. He looked cool as heck when he was doing it and I was really proud of him! Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions!  While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreen If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]Music & Creativityhttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-02/lu-hlt022619.phpInspirational Music & Sports performancehttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-01/f-mmi012918.phpMusic & Drivinghttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/aabu-tdm082213.phphttps://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e5b0/98e4ef211279d26a14d7502a80232a90dc2d.pdf[Fact Off]Nanoguitar Telharmoniumhttp://synthmuseum.com/magazine/0102jw.htmlhttps://ocw.mit.edu/courses/music-and-theater-arts/21m-380-music-and-technology-contemporary-history-and-aesthetics-fall-2009/lecture-notes-and-videos/MIT21M_380F09_lec11.pdfhttp://120years.net/the-telharmonium-thaddeus-cahill-usa-1897/http://www.csun.edu/~dwh50750/Classes/MUS191/Emusic_readings/ECenturyPartI.htmlScientific american article: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Telharmonium_-_Scientific_American_1907.png[Ask the Science Couch]Timbrehttp://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Sound/timbre.htmlhttps://cecm.indiana.edu/etext/acoustics/chapter1_timbre.shtmlhttps://ocw.mit.edu/courses/health-sciences-and-technology/hst-725-music-perception-and-cognition-spring-2009/lecture-notes/MITHST_725S09_lec07_timbre.pdfBeetlejuicehttps://twitter.com/VoiceSLPChris/status/1111285302352625665/video/1[Butt One More Thing]Brown notehttps://books.google.co.uk/books?id=khzDRYfj97AC&pg=PA932&lpg=PA932&dq=the+collophone+commemorated&source=bl&ots=vrgUH_MUh4&sig=Z2nnGZJ6W3_Ph_gzXKuhXCbLfW0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwie2pKZw7_QAhWsJcAKHdIlCYEQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttps://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ppv35z/in-search-of-the-brown-noise

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I'm joined by Stefan Chid stephen chid hello i'm here what's your favorite flavor of pop tarts frosted strawberry i don't think it's i don't think you could anybody could go over a frosted strawberry that's like the most neutral one i like them unfrosted i like the regular i feel like somebody just poured a bunch of Mountain Dew all over a pastry. That's a boomer Pop-Tart. That is an old person Pop-Tart.

I want less frosting. Yeah. Eat a bowl of oatmeal or something. You eat grape nuts. I do sometimes. Shredded wheat without the frosting. Yeah, that's very boomer. That shouldn't exist anymore. It's the year 2020.

We have the technology. We can put sugar on it. And we're all babies now. We need it. Stephen, what's your tagline? Mambo number five. Oh, gosh. Sam Schultz is also here with us. Sam, what's your tagline? Leather pants. Sari Riley, hello. Hello. What's your tagline? Oh, no no and i'm hank green and my tagline is she won't be coming around the mountain hank what's the best cloudy i've ever seen it's a great hank green question i did once see a cloud coming off of the top uh at the pass in glacier national park the logan pass and the cloud was like hanging there,

but then as it fell off the edge of the pass, it disappeared, and so it just sort of like was constantly water falling off the edge. It was really neat. It's a hell of a cloud. Thanks for asking. Every week here on SciShow Tangents,

we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score on a warning sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, amaze, and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score on a warning sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but we're not great at that. So if you go on a tangent and people deem it unworthy, we can dock you a Hank Buck.

And now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem this week from Stephan. I'm loving that. Notes, chords, ratios, organized across time in a staff in rows. Play it, sing it, if you've got a bell, ring it. That's right, this poem is musical. Music is felt universally, whether produced by voice or drums or strings. But does a chimpanzee understand harmony?

Or feel the rhythmic complexity? How can it be that a bunch of vibrating molecules makes me feel this way inside? Don't ask too many questions, my dude. There's only so much we can learn with MRI. Whether you're at work, whether you're at home, whether you're at a party, or if you are alone, every time is a good time to hear a musical collection of notes. Unless you're Sari. Wow.

It was everything. I was delighted and then offended. Wow. So our topic of the week is music. Thank you, Stefan, for sharing with the class. And he gets an extra buck, I believe. Yeah, I better get two bucks for this one. It is an extra buck to do it musically.

So now we're going to try and do our best to define music. Just give me like 10 words max. Making sounds with the goal of making people feel something. Oh my God. You said that in the least musical way possible. Hey, don't be comfort fairy enough. Wouldn't that include any conversation in music? Or like trying to scare somebody?

Like boo? Is boo music? I don't know. According to you it is. Yeah, could be. I feel like there's a time component. Like it's how sounds play out over time? I don't know. According to you, it is. Yeah, could be. I feel like there's a time component. Like it's how sounds play out over time. I don't know.

Like in like Western music, you're following like rules and principles of music theory. And so like there's notes that suggest the key. And there's specific like patterns within the rhythm and the notes and all that. We should say that Stefan knows things about music. He knows a couple things about music. I hadn't really thought about it, but if time didn't exist, music also could not exist.

All the notes would happen at the same time, and that would not be pretty. We'd be much more limited in the ones you could play. Although that's somewhat conditioned. If we were just used to hearing all the notes at once, and that was the only thing we knew. Oh, man. And there's no time.

So like, what are we anyways? I don't know. That's true. I definitely don't know the answer to that question, but I do like the idea that there is no music without time. Does music have some sort of pattern that conversation doesn't? Like pattern in the sounds that are made? What is music?

Is this music? doesn't like pattern in the sounds that are made what is there is turn it on music so if you record like the sound of a river like that's not music yeah but there could be like patterns in the waves or like birds chirping or like mosquitoes buzzing in a particular pattern is bird singing music i feel like it can be like it's starting to get musical, and there's a blurry line there where at some point you've now crossed the line into music. I think there's maybe a cultural component to it. Yeah, that's the great thing about ones like music, where it's like, well, ultimately everyone knows we're not going to get this one right. But there's also a lot of science. And it's a lot of math, too. Ratios. Both the ratios in terms of the notes, but also, you know, time signatures and rhythm.

Because I think that rhythm is obviously sort of… Oh, I guess I can't say that rhythm is necessary to music, but it's necessary for my personal enjoyment of music. I mean, the thing is, like, none of the individual things, because there's atonal music, too. Right. Like, each of the things that we are including in the definition, you can make music that doesn't have those things. Is there an etymology of music?

Oh, I didn't look that up, because I was just tuned out for this whole episode. I imagine it's from the muse, the Greek muses. Art of the muses. Oh, the art of the muses. Oh, the art of the muses. In classical Greece, any art in which the muses presided, but especially music with lyrical poetry. Any art.

So just a sculpture is music. Yes. Well, Sarah, you didn't tell me that. Because if I had walked into this room and been like, that sculpture right there of the thinker that's on the wall behind us, that's music. Everyone would have laughed at me. You really don't know what music is. Is that why you don't listen to the radio? You think it's sculptures? Yeah, you look

at a little sculpture on your dashboard. And now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for the rest of us to enjoy and be educated by, but only one of those facts is real. The other ones are lies, and we have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which is the true fact. Sam, it's your turn.

I appreciate you moving on, but I feel profoundly unsatisfied by whatever that definition segment was. In movies, inspirational music swells when the hero is about to best their foe, score a game-winning goal, etc. But does this movie logic apply to the real world? Could you listen to rousing, inspirational music and suddenly start doing whatever you're doing even better? In certain situations, yes. So which of these is one of those situations? In one situation, but not two. One situation, but not two.

Number one, listening to music while doing creative work like writing or visual art significantly increases your creativity. Number two, listening to music while driving makes you focus less on small distractions, therefore less likely to make mistakes. Or number three, listening to music while playing sports helps you score more points. Does it matter at all what kind of music it is? I feel like I've seen research that has talked about listening to more aggressive styles of music

makes people drive faster. Definitely. But I've also seen research that says that people who are driving faster tend to make less mistakes because they're paying more attention than people

who are driving really slow. Right, but the mistakes they make are more catastrophic. Yes. I did say rousing inspirational music. Rousing inspirational music. Well, that doesn't sound like it's about art then.

I know personally that I cannot write and listen to music at the same time. But I can draw and listen to music at the same time. But like the conflict of words with other words. So even instrumental music though i don't know yes to me if i try to listen to instrumental music while reading or writing my brain goes

too much too much i cannot end this yeah i i can listen to like uh the hackers soundtrack while i write emails and i feel like it makes me super productive. Just blast the music. I'm just like, I want to do all these emails. Do you consider that creative work? Well, emails can be creative work. But usually if I'm resorting to the hacker's soundtrack, it means that I need to write a lot of emails. And so my emails are going to be of low quality, but they're going to at least be sent.

I don't really have strong opinions about this. Because you hate music. I don't hate music. In high school art class, my art teacher would sometimes let people play music on their headphones. Sometimes not. Like people grumbled when you couldn't.

Would you get pissed at them when they were listening to music? No. I would just listen to my art in silence. The sports thing makes sense because in college, my dorm room was near the tennis courts and they always played music during the practice. That was how I stayed up to date with the current music trends is what came from the tennis court. Stefan, any thoughts as a music expert, man? I feel driven by music. And so, like, I feel like I'm, man? I feel driven by music. And so I feel like I'm more creative when I'm listening to music.

Obviously, if I'm writing music, it's harder to listen to music while you're doing that. Yeah, that makes it hard. But I always have music playing while I'm driving. But I don't know if that affects my focus. It's just like I need that stimulation. Otherwise, I'm like, what am I doing here? Alone with my thoughts, which I don't want to be. I'm going to go with driving because I think that that seems real to me. I think that we can sort of like get sort of sucked in if we don't have

something to pull us out a little bit. I'm going to say sports because even though it sounds cliche, it makes sense. I don't know. I listen to music when I run because I get bored. Wow, Sari, listening to music. What are you listening to? I don't know. It's like what Nicole told me to listen to. And then also musical soundtracks that I just put on rotation. Cats?

Do you listen to cats? I don't listen to cats. I hate cats. I put on a bunch of things and then I took out anything that felt too slow that I started thinking about how much pain my body was in. Like memories from cats. Yeah, memories from cats. I like cats. Well, this is fortunate because I was leaning towards the creativity one.

So I'm going to go with that one and we'll spread it out. Oh, you all did? Oh, wow. It's all the way around. Okay. The answer is sports. I thought I was right. Music expert over here.

So with creative work, in a 2019 study, researchers in Sweden presented college students with word puzzles that required creative thinking to solve. The students that solved the puzzle in a library did way better than students who solved it while listening to any type of music, including music that they knew really well and just instrumental music. I think they did the worst listening to music that they'd never heard before with lyrics. This is a bad sign for me.

Yeah. Yeah, you're holding yourself back. So anecdotally, there's this animator, Richard Williams, who was in charge of Who Framed Roger Abbott. And he has this book called The Animator's Survival Kit. And there's a very infamous page where he has a cartoon of him screaming at somebody who's listening to music while they're drawing, saying that nobody is smart enough to think of two things at one time.

So a lot of animators are like, that's bullshit. But he probably is right. I know I have to pause music a lot when I'm like, when I really have to work on something, I have to like pause it and think really hard about it. With driving, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence of people saying that they quote, can't see while they drive if music is too loud. And this is something that happens to me all the time. Like if I'm trying to park, I have to turn my music off

because I like can't think straight. So in 2007, a study using simulated driving tests and other reflex tests showed that listening to loud like rock music in your car can decrease your reaction time by 20%. Oh. So be careful, Stefan. 20% is a lot. That is amazing.

Yeah. And there's evidence also that if you're listening to music, you know that that's more distracting than listening to music you don't know. Oh, yeah. So like a driving playlist where you're singing along. Oh, yeah. You make more mistakes driving. But you don't fall asleep, which is really what I'm going for.

That's the biggest mistake you can make. So that's probably okay. And then with the sports one, in 2018, there was a study where participants were shooting basketballs from distances that they got to choose. So the study found that participants who had, and these were people who had all kinds of sports experience, so people with low self-esteem with sports who were already performing poorly at the task and did not improve when they were listening to music, but people who were good at sports and who listened to music of their choosing, usually like really peppy music took

bigger chances like stood farther away and did significantly better shooting so if you're good at sports already listening to exciting music will make you better at sports but if you are sad about sports already it will not help i like like the difference between being bad at sports just being sad that's kind of what the study made it sound like. It was like people who self-rated themselves as bad at sports never got better at it, no matter what. So maybe if they believed in themselves a little bit more. That's a lesson for life. It really is.

Thanks. Next up, we're going to take a short break and then the fact off. welcome back everybody sam buck total stephan's got two because of your song sam's got two because you just rocked it in the truth or fail and sarah's got one because she got that good old easy question right and i got nothing by the way so it's it's my chance now to come back for you and attempt to get some points here in the fact where two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds and you get to assign your sam buck to the fact you like the most we We're going to decide who goes first. I can't look at this. Ah, yes. So the question is, in the 20 teens, the Museum of Science and Industry in

Manchester, England used an online test called Hooked on Music to ask about 12,000 participants to identify the catchiest, most quickly recognizable song. These are the five catchiest. But which of these songs was scientifically deemed the catchiest, most quickly recognizable song. These are the five catchiest. But which of these songs was scientifically deemed the catchiest? Is it Eye of the Tiger by Survivor? Wannabe by Spice Girls? It's Wannabe by Spice Girls. Is it SOS by ABBA? Mambo No. 5?

Ooh, my tagline! By Lubega. Or Just Dance by Lady Gaga? And whoever's closest to number one with their guess gets to go. Oh, I see.

Gets to choose. Yeah. I went with Wannabe by Spice Girls. I am not changing my guess because that's the right answer. I want Siri to sing a bar of each of these songs.

I only know three of the five. I don't know what the Oh, that's good. I don't know what three and four are. That's like a natural 50-50. Yeah.

You would only know the catchiest songs. That's right. Oh, you're right. Okay, then Eye of the Tiger, because I felt like I knew that from the youngest age. The most quickly recognizable song is Wannabe by the Spice Girls. So!

I know exactly what's about to happen. Number two was Mambo No. 5, and then eye of the tiger oh wow i would have thought eye of the tiger was second because it's like yeah that's the thing is the first line of mambo number five him saying mambo number five though that might be all right you guys i'm gonna go first do you want to know about the highest note that has ever been played on a musical instrument? On an instrument.

Well, it was played by a laser on a guitar that is smaller than a red blood cell. The guitar is? The guitar is. They made a nano guitar out of crystalline silicon that was 10 microns long. Its length is significantly thinner than a human hair. They first made a nanoguitar in 1997, but it didn't have strings that were playable. And they created a second model in 2003 that had strings. And instead of getting a very small man to play it, they can shoot a laser at it. And that laser can then, by the way that the laser light gets reflected back, you can see how fast the string is vibrating.

And it's vibrating 130,000 times higher than the sound of a full-scale guitar. So it's 133,000 times higher pitched than a guitar. And the laser is plucking the string? It just shoots it and the string then vibrates. Yeah. Hits it with some photons. It's like some atomic excitation. Exactly.

What? Does it look like a very, very tiny guitar? Yes. It looks like a very, very tiny guitar. Oh, yeah. It's pretty metal. Yeah. If you saw it, you would say, that's a guitar.

Yeah. It doesn't actually look like it has a bridge. It looks like the crystaline silicon strings are actually what sort of holds the neck together. But if you're wondering why they did it, it's basically because they could. So, the scientists said that sometimes nanotechnology

has a bit of a negative feel toward it, and they want to make it not scary to people. And so sometimes they like to try and make cute things with nanotechnology. So there's no application for this. Well, they think that there may be some applications, and they're like, oh, this is interesting.

Maybe we could use it for this over here. But, like, honestly, they made a tiny guitar. My tardigrade needs a guitar. That's right. I think this would be too small even for a tardigrade. Yeah, if it's,'s like red blood cell size you could give it to like a virus or something

yeah viruses are tiny way too small for this oh oh no well what can have it then sorry yeah blood cells

okay good old human cells they don't have arms though tardigrades need them they're the only ones with arms yeah we don't anthropomorphize our cells

please I can't imagine my blood cell you ever seen a little movie called Osmosis Jones? No. It doesn't sound like you have. If you make a small guitar

but you can't play the strings, is it really a guitar? Exactly. No. It's just a picture of a guitar. Yeah. But if it makes noise, even if that noise is undetectable,

it's a guitar. Now, it's not tuned. It's undetectable by ears. It's still detectable, right? It's detectable, yes. Because I feel like if it's undetectable by anything, then that's not a noise anymore. It's detectable by lasers. When they're making teeny stuff like this, are they 3D printing?

What are they doing? You know, I don't know how they make these tiny silicon crystals. What note does it play? Do they know? That is a great question. I wanted to figure out what note the strings played, but I was not able to. I'm not convinced that they know based on how they reported the number. You could totally figure it out.

I think that this article doesn't have the number because it's like about 130,000 times higher. But like if you were measuring it with a laser you could actually tell what the what the frequency was and then from that you could be like this is a c sharp you know 45 octaves higher than middle c or whatever i don't know i understand anything about music at all good thing we're i don't know what an octave is i don't know so on that, like if you play middle C, that's 440 hertz in our musical system. And so then if you go up an octave, you're doubling the frequency.

Okay. Which is why they sort of sound related. They sound like the same note. Because every time you go up an octave, you're just doubling that frequency. And so if you know the exact frequency... Yeah, yeah. So the distance between each octave

in terms of absolute numbers, grows over time. Is that how they knew that the black hole was making the noise of a certain note or something? If you figure out the frequency, you can just do some quick math based on notes that we use and have a tuning for and then say, oh, it's a B. All right. Whose turn is it? Mine. and then say, oh, it's a B. All right, whose turn is it?

Mine. So, synthetic music and synthesizing electronic music is where it gets really physics-y and brain-bendy for me, even more so than just normal instruments. But humans figured it out way earlier than I expected. An inventor named Thaddeus Cahill patented the art of an apparatus for generating and distributing music electrically, a device he called the telharmonium, in 1897. So that was when mass music media like radio or CDs didn't really exist.

Basically, he wanted the telharmonium to be a scientific synthesizer of any instrument or orchestra or whatever he wanted that transmitted sounds over phone lines to any home or hotel or restaurant on demand to people who subscribed to his system. Although you'd need an amplified phone receiver to hear it. And in one article, they said you could tuck it away in foliage or flowers, like a hidden speaker. In 1901, he had a working prototype where two performers would sit at keyboards, essentially, which would trigger tone wheels, which was like the big invention of this thing, which were, to my understanding, cylinders with different widths, like variable widths along them that spun in a magnetic field. And because of the bumps, some of them were closer to the magnet, some of them were farther from the magnet, and that generated an alternating electric current and produced the sine waves that created the musical tones. And so his model that he presented publicly in 1906 weighed over 200 tons, measured over 60 feet long, and required 2,000 switches, which I think are the keys,

and included 145 separate tone wheels and cost about $200,000 to build, which is about five and a half million today. So it was this huge machine and it was new and flashy. And the first time it broadcast in a restaurant was full of surprise and delight. But the New York telephone company noticed or started getting complaints

because this music machine was interfering with normal telephone conversations across the telephone lines like it generated so much electrical power so they stopped providing cables and this inventor was left without cables for his device which meant no sounds were being transmitted which meant no so no one could subscribe to it he got deplatformed. And so his business tanked. Was there radio? There was radio? No.

Was there radio? There wasn't radio? There was radio existing, but it wasn't, like, popularized. Like, we had learned about radio waves. Yeah. And so this basically left a void for wireless transmissions

instead of wired transmissions to become popular. Was the interference music, were they, like, hearing music on the line? I think so. Because in that case, that's awesome. You shouldn't complain. You're getting free music.

Sounds nice. You didn't have to subscribe. There is a person in a room playing music for you. Just enjoy it. But the people instead were like, ghosts, ghosts, definitely ghosts. You're interrupting my conversation. I'm having neighborhood gossip sesh. Is there any record of what it sounded like?

No, there are no recordings because after his business tanked, his brother tried to preserve one of the instruments, but they could not find anyone to protect it. And so they just scrapped it for the metal because there was so much. So no recordings of it. And the three versions of it that was built have been lost to time. And so we have no idea what it sounded like. Oh, my God.

He was so far ahead of his time. He was streaming. Did they call you? Did you have to answer the phone or did it just show up? I think you had to have cables run to your house. Oh, okay. Like a phone line. It's like a separate line.

But you could just pick it up and there would always be music playing, I think. That's what it had to be being played live yes yeah yeah so the two people had to be sitting at this keyboard playing but they could simulate any sort of violin or trumpet or whatever with this one machine it's so freaking weird i just feel like if he came forward in time he would show him spotify he'd be like i knew it yeah i was on to something he's listening to it and he's like what do their wheels look like where are the cables search the foliage how do your wheels this good

well good fact me and Sari I gotta give you guys a countdown and you're gonna tell me which fact you like the best okay three

two one Sari yeah I figured that was a really good fact they're both really good though but the first streaming service i know the first streaming service was like a eight ton machine yeah it's really good and i'm like mine's very small oh small is great i love small but it was both guys doing things because they thought it would be fun yeah yeah with music.

Yeah, but I feel like one of them worked harder. Now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we ask a listener question to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This question comes from at Patty Shag and at Pen Paper Planner. What causes timber in instruments? Why does a guitar sound like a guitar and a piano like a piano, etc.? So, like, there's a clean pure note that's 440 hertz, is that right? And that's like,

it sounds like that. That's not what guitars sound like. That's not what flutes sound like. They all sound different. They all play the same note, but they all sound different. So you have these like quality to the note that is not just the note and that's the timbre uh-huh is that right yeah yes it's timbre it's also timbre i just think you can't use such a banal word to describe this quality of sound you need something

that sounds fancy timbre yeah timbre is better than timber it's just wood but yeah so you have the the fundamental frequency but there's also, usually you have a series of like higher frequencies that are related to the fundamental frequencies that are also produced. And so you get like the octave at 880 and then there's like, I wrote them down like 1320 and 1760 and they're related to 440 by specific ratios. And like normally that lowest frequency is the loudest. And then as you go up, they get quieter. And then the way that they resonate within like the body of the acoustic guitar or within your throat or within the piano body, like it emphasizes or de-emphasizes like some of those frequencies differently. And so you get like a unique frequency spectrum, even for the same note between different instruments but something i

learned about timbre for this is that it's there's also other contextual clues it's not just like the frequencies that you're hearing when you pluck a guitar there's a sharp transient where it's very loud at first when you pluck it and then it gets quieter and a very sick like there's a signature pattern to how the volume changes over time. Whereas like your voice, you can modulate in all kinds of different ways. But you can't really reproduce the same kind of volume envelope that you would get from plucking a guitar string. And so we learned to recognize different instruments using all these different clues. So does everyone's voice have a different timbre?

That's like how you recognize voices is because our voices have these unique signatures. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter, at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out upcoming topics for episodes every week. Thank you to at PartlyHarmless, at DGGellman, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode.

Sam Buck final scores. I come in with a whopping zero points. Sam and Stefan tied for second with two. And Sari coming out on top. I won the music episode. Wow. Give me a Grammy. Is that the right one?

Yeah, good job. Had to go through the other three and be like, that's not the music one. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen.

That helps us know what you like about the show. Also, we look at our iTunes reviews for topic ideas for future episodes. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment

from this episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

I've been Stephen Schaap. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled,

but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. The brown note is a supposed frequency in the infrasonic range somewhere below 20 hertz. Oh, my God. That makes people poop when they hear it what but it's never been proven and we actually think it's the myth started in a new scientist fake article from december 26 1974 about a fake instrument called the colophone and they said in this quote however as soon as the first notes crashed out the audience showed signs of discomfort which gave rise to panic before a verse of the anthem was complete. Moreover, the evident mass psychological disturbance was accompanied by unpleasant physiological symptoms, pain, diuresis, and diarrhea.

And, like, after this article was published, where it was like, it caused people to shit themselves and pee and whatever, the brown note idea kind of took on a life of its own, but it's never been scientifically proven. But that article was fake. Yes, it was a lie. Was it a lie on purpose? Was it like April Fool's? I think so. It was December, so I don't know why it was a fake article. Back in the 70s, April Fool's was during December.

Because of the leap year, it moved. What is diuresis? Peeing yourself? My bonus bonus fact is that trombones used to be called sack butts.